Most of them are very boring. ‘What time does the supermarket close?’ No idea. “What’s the name of that actress who’s baby you held and you didn’t realise who she was?' Can’t remember. ‘Can you send me the signed contract ASAP? No chance.

It was Rosamund Pike's baby by the way, I was just going goo goo at this very cute baby and then glanced at his mum, bit of a shock. I've been able to look this up as we now have our normal super slow connection back working.

But zero connection is really boring. It’s been dickey for the last 6 weeks, dead as old socks for the last 10 days.

So we go to a neighbour’s house with our laptops, I drive up the hill ‘to the woods’ to get a 4G connection, I sit outside the local Tesco store to use their free wifi. The list goes on.

We’ve lived in a rural area for 26 years, the first ten we didn’t have any internet connection, the following sixteen we had a bit of dial-up, that was fun, then about ten years ago we got something akin to broadband courtesy of BT. Ass numbingly slow, but it was always on and it always worked.

It’s a BT copper wire connection, I’d love to moan on and on about BT but I can’t be bothered, if we had a connection from any other company they’d still have to use the same wires, and these wires were strung up on poles in the 1950's.

But the most annoying part is the curse of net connection reliant software. So many applications rely on a net connection. I love google docs. Forget it. Even something I try not to use, Adobe Reader, goes all wibbly and keeps telling me it can’t get a connection. Microsoft Word, the new annoying Office 365 version gets all moody because ‘it can’t make a connection.'

What about the fact that I run a YouTube Channel, that I need to research and check things as I edit, what about sending xml files to my wonderful editor Mark.

Tesco, the woods, the neighbours, here I come. A massive time sink.

If this web business we rely on so much goes down big time, everything we use goes down with it. Not having an internet connection at home for almost 6 weeks has really brought all these problems to the forefront, believe me, when you use the wretched internet as much as I do and you can’t get on it, life turns into an annoying hassle.

Anyway, in the next 2 months, we hope, Fastershire will connect us up to the fibre optic cable that's buried in the lane where we live, I have been promised a synchronous gigabit connection, no data caps.

Because I make Fully Charged, a tiny micro series about electric cars and the future of transport and energy, I suppose I should give a moments attention to the recently re-launched Top Gear.

I don’t really want to because there’s only been one episode and just about every mildly annoyed middle class white male and their dog has already passed judgement.

I try to stand as far as I can from that grouping even though I’m a mildly happy old middle class white man with 2 bloody dogs, although one is my wife’s and I’m the numptie who has to take him for walks.

Only one episode has been broadcast as I write this and who knows how it will develop, I wish the team, especially Rory Reid who is a delight, all the best with it.

Of course I'm more than happy to say what I felt was wrong with the old Top Gear.

The opening credits, the music, the format, the ridiculous adulation of absurd, old fashioned cars, the endless use of old runways, the tiresome use of drone footage, low angle shots, smoke and flickering light-jump-cut-zooms on wheels and exhaust pipes.

Middle aged men standing in front of a crowd that has been carefully managed to ensure at least one or two youngish women are seen peering over the shoulders of the presenters.

Tired and tedious, and that was the old Top Gear.

The new Top Gear, um, is exactly the same, which is a great shame.

Now, I have little interest in Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc, the 'chemistry' seems a little awkward but early old Top Gear chemistry was non existent. That stuff takes time.

Whatever happens to Top Gear it’s not their fault poor fellows. Nor any of the other presenters, they don’t make decisions about format, music, title sequences, studio layout etc etc. The producers do, they, for some rather depressing reason, decided not to use the opportunity to come up with something actually new.

I fully accept that Top Gear is an entertaining show, it’s not meant to be a dull factual show about cars, that’s the really old Top Gear (1970’s -2000) and that was truly dire.

The new (2001-onward) format proved itself to be a massive winner, three grumpy, dysfunctional right wing white men droning on about which car was faster, louder or made you ‘look good.’ All that was fine and dandy, I always watched, I laughed, cringed and was entertained. I learned nothing, less than nothing, it turned my brain to pulp but I was entertained.

The newly launched Top Gear re-creates that with integrity, precision and a massive lack of imagination or risk taking.

We are facing unprecedented changes in the very arena Top Gear is about. Personal transport and the energy used to power it, none of this is remotely referred to in either a dull boring way or an entertaining jolly way.

Huge changes in not only technology but company policy, corporate decisions, deceptions and U turns, governmental energy and pollution policy which makes almost every car driven on Top Gear utterly irrelevant.

There’s no question that what originally spurred me to start making Fully Charged was precisely this, the fact that what is really happening in the world of cars is joyfully ignored by this hyper popular show.

Yes, Top Gear has made the BBC a fortune, and under the current UK administration, the BBC needs every penny it can get as it’s under relentless assault from Murdoch and his government, sorry, the government.

The Murdoch press will naturally use the re-launch as an excuse for another assault, and to make matters worse the soon to be released old fellows from old Top Gear on Amazon show is doubtless going to be amazing.

I know several people working on the show and they are all raving about it. They have a virtually limitless budget and no reason to hold back on the misogyny, racism and homophobia, they’re going to have a field day, Murdoch and his lackey’s are going to fall prone, worshipping the man god Clarkson.

Of course the new Amazon version will contain the same ridiculous old fashioned cars, jokes, settings and editorial decisions, which is fine, it’s what they should do.

The new Top Gear, so far, I’d be happy to be wrong, has missed an absolutely golden opportunity to do something genuinely different and that leaves me feeling very sad.

It’s a painful middle-class-English-lefty cliché to travel in luxury and style from damp and grey England to vibrant, colourful and very hot Italy while feeling slightly guilty about it.

A good honest conservative could make exactly the same trip and feel proud that they’d ‘worked hard, saved sensibly, invested wisely’ and they thoroughly deserved the experience their wealth and privilege had supplied.

A good honest conservative may even feel some empathy to those much less fortunate, they may give generously to charity and not wish ill on others, but they essentially support the status quo, they support the system as it is, in more extreme cases they support the system as they believe it was, when people ‘knew their place’ in the class system and didn’t make such a fuss about everything.

Most importantly they will feel confident that free market capitalism is the best system the human race has devised and everything else is just noise.

But oh woe is me. I don’t have that confidence.

I’m a middle-class-English-lefty who drove a £60,000 car 1,280 miles across Europe and is now staying in a stunning Italian apartment hanging off a cliff over the Mediterranean. I’m wrangling with hypocrisy, self-loathing and the conviction that inequality is a massive problem and I’m part of that problem.

Okay, I didn’t fly, in fact the total journey here and back home will have one of the lowest carbon footprints possible.

The car is we drove electric, a black Tesla Model S. All through Europe the electricity came from a mixture of renewables, nuclear and only a teeny bit of coal.

The two chargers we used in Italy were supplied by 100% renewable electricity, hydro and solar.

To further ease the guilt I have spent the last 7 years promoting the adoption of electric cars, renewable energy and a greater understanding of the energy industry and it’s control over our lives, but still. Come on. I’ve just undertaken an amazing trip that is only available to a privileged few.

Owning the Tesla has made me really take stock of my assumptions, no longer can I justify it simply in terms of it’s engineering innovations, the challenge it throws to the automotive industry and in particular the fossil fuel industry.

Very few people will ever be able to afford such a high-end machine, so is the Tesla Model S just a rich person’s plaything? Does it mean nothing more than the latest high-end gadget you’d see in a display at an exclusive, invitation only showroom?

Are the people who own and drive these cars wealthy elitists who look down on the lumpen masses in their forlorn fossil burners?

Possibly, although I am clinging to the belief this is not the case.

I’ll explain a little about the car for those sensible enough not to be informed or interested.

The Tesla Model S is a 100% electric, 5 seat luxury sedan. It houses an 85 kilowatt hour battery under the floor which give the car a realistic, highway range of around 250 miles on one charge. Throughout the USA, China and Western Europe there is a network of ‘superchargers’ in key locations that charge this car with enough electricity to cover another 200 miles in about 25 minutes.

These chargers are free to use, so in terms of fuel cost, the journey of over 1200 miles from our home to Italy was free.

Obviously we had to pay for food, accommodation, road tolls etcetera, but the fuel was free.

How can that possibly work, how can a free fuel system be sustainable. How will it not be abused by people.

Come on, this is free market capitalism for goodness sake. Nothing is free.

Two important points. One, you do pay upfront for the right to use the supercharger network. About £2,000 is added to the price of the car.

But more importantly the fuel is very cheap, it’s much easier to produce than fossil fuels and if the investment is made at the installation phase of the chargers, then the day-to-day cost of supplying the electricity is very low.

So this is where I start to drop the cloak of guilt. Yes I drive a posh car, the comparison to similar priced fossil burning cars is nothing short of embarrassing.

The compromises we had to make to undertake the journey were so minimal we didn’t notice them.

So I am starting to feel slightly less guilty and over privileged. In 5 years time it won’t even be an issue as there will be so many more electric cars on the road, posh ones and normal sensible ones, the Model S will no longer be such an icon.

So I’m now feeling very grateful that I’ve had the chance to experience such a journey. I don’t deserve it in any way, no one does. But while I can do it, I’m very glad I did.

Last weekend I drove through driving rain to go to a festival called WOMAD (World of Music And Dance) at Charlton Park in Wiltshire where I took part in a panel discussion about young people and the future of food, farming, transport, energy and the environment.

It was organised by Ecotricity, a renewable energy company and I was one of four 'mentors' who had been in touch with one of the four young finalists.

Here they are with Ecotricity supremo Dale Vince.

I was mentoring Nerys Pickup (on far left) who's dad Chris has a Hybrid Toyota Auris and the two of them have become very interested in the future of transport, energy, electric cars and related topics. She is an amazing 15 year old who spoke to a crowd of many hundreds of people with self-assurance and clarity.

The others taking part, ranging in age from 13 to 15 were equally impressive, they had an amazing grasp of their chosen topic and answered questions from the audience with confidence and insight.

Blimey, they were really annoying. When I was 15 I would have mumbled and stuttered and only been able to deliver half baked notions I had almost zero understanding of. It's not fair! Why are they so damn clever?

On a marginally more serious note it gave all the adults attending a glimmer of hope against the backdrop of the rain and a current government hell bent on destroying any and all renewable energy projects and staunchly supporting their fossil overlords.

One minor example of the true depths of casual indifference this government is showing toward sustainable technology is the (and prepare to laugh at the title) Minister for Energy and Climate Change Amber Rudd.

Apart from the fact that this government is now second only to the climate change denying Australian Government, apart from the fact that Ms Rudd has slashed and burnt her way through just about every environmental policy previous governments have introduced, some fairly dodgy behaviour has recently come to light that even the wretched Daily Mail have felt the need to report.

Government Ministers are under strict scrutiny about their contacts outside government. We don’t want them being influenced by parties unknown, we want transparency in our politicians.

So they are required to report on anyone they are in contact with who might try and influence their decisions or apply pressure on them.

It’s a parliamentary rule, they all have to do it. Unfortunately Ms Rudd somehow forgot to mention her brother Roland. Well it's just her brother, what's important about that?

Her brother happens to be an energy lobbyist who chairs a lobbying company called Finsbury who represent the Halite Energy Group.

Who are they?

Well, they’re a nice bunch of chaps who want to install a 900 million cubic meter ‘natural’ gas storage facility for fracked gas under a river in Lancashire, in an area renown for being seismically unstable, What could possibly be wrong with that. LOL.

Anyway, boring Westminster shenanigans aside, the point is these old energy systems are just that, old energy systems, dated, failing, corrupting, decrepit and increasingly desperate.

Sure Roland Rudd is raking it in at the moment, blimey, I want to be a lobbyist for a gas company, he’s on around £3 million a year, but anyone with two brain cells knows the Rudds of this world are doomed to fail.

The immense global momentum behind renewable energy technology is not going to grind to a halt because a handful of uber-privileged numbskulls in the UK kow-tow to their old energy elite siblings and pals.

Of course this sets us back in the UK but the simple fact remains, renewable energy always gets cheaper, all the other options will continue to get more expensive and more fraught with stress.

This idiotic government will impose fracking as long as it isn’t near their own houses, do it up North and hope no one will notice.

They’ll bow before the oil sheiks, the coal bullies and the gas tzars, they will waste billions on absurd technologies that will dig us further into the pit, but they will fail.

Let us not be downhearted but rejoice in that failure.

The young people I met last weekend see right through the painfully obvious anti wind farm rhetoric of the Rudds, being anti wind farm only means one thing, you are pro burning fossils because there is more profit in it and that profit is for shareholders only, unlike community renewable projects which share the money locally.

And of course when you get booted out of office you can go and work with your brother and rake in a few mill for the pension.